Transcription
Hello and welcome to the video. This is a quick video about the fact that Express LS 4.0 has finally been released. Actually came out at the weekend um today as I'm recording this, but I'll actually release this on Tuesday because the weekend was already full of scheduled videos and things anyway.
However, I've had a couple of you get in touch as soon as that thing was released saying, "Can you cover the things that have changed about it and what is different?" So, I thought, "Yeah, cool. Absolutely. Let's go and cover that." Now, I don't like talking too much about stuff before it's been released because I've been bitten before where things change before they actually make it into public domain. It's been a release candidate for a long time. It's been very heavily tested by lots and lots of pilots. So, it's kind of fun to get our hands on it.
And excitingly, Channel 5, that whole legacy thing about Express LRS, where channel 5 has to be high. [snorts] And it's a legacy from the early days of Express LRS cuz let's be honest, it was developed for quad pilots, for beta flight, and Express LRS has developed into the go-to for the hobby now. And it's been used for everything, cars, boats, planes, wings, with and without flight controllers. So having that silly legacy channel 5 thing has been a real pain in the butt. And I've talked about it historically about stopping Express LRS being able to work nicely over SBUS with things like legacy stabilizers and some not so legacy ones actually and things like helicopters too. And occasionally the Express LRS devs do take a little bit of time to give us what we want. Another example would be Sbus, but at this point express LRS 4.0 Zero is almost giving us everything that we've been asking for since it really took hold as a project.
So, let me jump on the computer and go through the release notes, kind of give you the highlights. Again, all this stuff is available. You can read it yourself in lots more detail if you're interested. I'll put a link down below. So, here we are in the release notes. Uh, all of this is available if you want to go and get into the weeds a little bit more about what has actually changed. There's a massive amount of work gone into this. So, a huge thank you to all the Express LRS developers for putting their time and effort into this essentially for free.
Uh, couple of caveats before we get too far into this. Be aware that the support for STM32based hardware has been removed. That means that all those people who were out there pioneering this with things like the FR Sky R9M hardware and other bits and pieces, you know what? You're kind of going to have to stick with the versions that you are on. It looks like Express LS 4.0 is leaving that legacy behind.
So, let's go through this in no particular order. I'm just going to go through it as it appears here. Actually, you know what? No, I'm not. I'm going to go through this one first. Channel 5. Now, historically, channel 5 has needed to be in a high position in order to turn on all the goodness, dynamic power, and other bits and pieces. And although you could turn those things off, lots of pilots when they were using the Express LRS technology with older stabilizers over things like SBUS didn't really appreciate this and we're getting lousy range and performance issues because channel 5 wasn't high. We now have the ability to move it to another physical or logical switch and put it on another channel. So, if you are using an old style stabilizer or maybe one of the OM hobby modern stabilizers in your helicopter or whatever, going to 4.0 is finally going to fix that issue. You are still going to have to have an arming channel. That could be logical so that when you move the throttle off the very lowest position, it's armed or whatever you want to do. But now we have that flexibility. For me, I would probably just move it out the way and put it on channel 11 or 12. And that way, then I can use channel five for whatever gain mode or whatever it is on those pieces of older technology that need channel 5 to be something other than a binary position channel.
The next one then that I'll talk about and I'll I'll kind of zoom down because it's kind of hidden at the bottom, but this is this is kind of big news. LR1121 has been in it's the technology the transceiver technology inside a lot of the modern radios. So things like the Radio Master TX16S Mark III things like the GS GX12 lots of modern radios are using this new technology and with Express LRS 4.0 we actually get access to a new 20 packet modes. [snorts] So, this allows us to unlock all of the performance of those LR1121based transceivers that are in these newer radios. So, if you have one of these newer radios, you know what? It's probably worthwhile you're looking at potentially playing around with this so that when you're playing with the different modes, then you get the maximum performance. But they're saying here that this is the whole reason that 4.0 zero needed to happen, but it's nowhere near the top of the list of things that they've changed, which I think is quite interesting.
The next one to talk about then is automatic CH antenna modes. I've done videos about this in the past about whether or not it's things like uh diversity or whether it's Gemini mode or all those other kind of different bits and pieces. It's confused a load of people. The cool thing is as of 4.0, zero. It's all going to automatically be selected between true diversity and Gemini mode based on the transmitter setting. It's all going to be set automatically. You don't have to mess around with this to try and figure out which mode you need on your radio for the particular receiver that you've got and how you've got it set up.
Next one to talk about then is they have expanded the PWM receiver ranges. So if you are using PWM receivers in your car, boat, plane, or whatever, you can now go the full range from 500 to 2500 microsconds to drive the servos to their maximum position if that's been a problem for you historically. And [snorts] they've also increased the fail safe a [clears throat] little bit outside that range by about 23 microsconds from 476 to 2523. So that means that any servo based craft, cars, boats, wings, planes, radiocontrol trucks, whatever it is, now gives you that little bit more latitude to drive the servo to the very extremes of its position.
Next one to talk about then is the adapt adaptive dynamic power. This is a quite a nice change. There's actually a lot of changes inside 4.0 zero about how the communication happens between the radio and the receiver and vice versa and how it uses that communication to improve the performance of the link. This is a nice one where it means that um it this majorly improves the power for things like the 1121 systems I've already mentioned which means that you're not going to be going to full blast output as often. It's a lot smarter in this new firmware for those adaptive dynamic power systems so that it's not just turning on the tap all the time when it thinks there might be a problem.
There is a new web user interface. So if you update your Express LRS configurator, you're going to look very different from the ones that we've had so far. Not necessarily a bad thing. It has been like that well since the very early days. And this will hopefully provide the format for them moving forward. So be ready for that when you update it. I'm going to be doing that in the next couple of days as I start to play with this in anger here.
The other nice thing is there has improved telemetry rates. So whether you're operating in Gemini mode and you have multiple antennas or whether it's a single antenna, there is an improvement in the telemetry bandwidth that we're getting back. Now this is big news. If you want to do things like get Mavink telemetry back to the radio or you're passing the telemetry back to some kind of ground station and trying to use it, I have been very disappointed historically with the telemetry bandwidth and 4.0 addresses that. So, it means that with Gemini mode, we're going to get a lot more and even if you only have a single antenna, you're going to get about a 30% increase in in bandwidth. So telemetry times are going to uh be reduced because the bandwidth has gone up. So if you are playing a lot with telemetry, this is fantastic news.
The back pack has got a lot smarter as well. So um it supports sending data to HTX instead. So that means that you could potentially use devices like this foot pedal to control stuff, which potentially opens the door to lots of rigs that you could have that quite complicated that actually connect into the radio via the backpack and be used for control. That's a great idea.
The next one is quite cool. So they've got a new DJI output protocol. So, if you have a DJI uh VTX inside your model, the way it works, as you're probably aware, is that it's in low power state until you arm the model. The flight controller would then send an armed status via the telemetry link that is connected to and then that would go to whichever power you have set. That now can be done directly from Express LRS. Um I'm hoping that this also means that it's going to work for things like HD0 and Walk 2. If I get a chance, I might try it. If you've already tried it and found that it works on things like Walknell, I'd be really interested. I know lots of pilots who would love this to have their HD FPV system go to full power automatically without having to mess around adding something like a flight controller with Betafly, INAV, or even something like that Sparrow Pro that we looked at last summer.
You can add uh NMEA based GPS to the system which is going to be interesting for those of you that want that going to be see whether or not people are going to bring out specific ones. There are more robust syncing options which have been uh improved. So rather than some of the weirdness that you could get when it syncs that's all been sorted out and there's loads of other changes as well. So again, if you are interested in this, I would come into here and have a good read of this because the stuff that I've covered is only really the highlights and it's only about 8 10 things that's changed when actually there is loads and loads and loads of stuff that has been improved, tweaked, changed, and it just means that Express LRS 4.0 zero is going to give you improved performance both for control but also for things like telemetry as well. And we also finally have got rid of that weird channel 5 legacy thing.
So there you have it. Those are the highlights. Very exciting time. The only downside I guess is that with this stuff as with a lot of this is that every time we have a major increase like now we're at Express RS version 4.0. It means that you cannot bind or they not definitely don't support you binding to an express LRS4 receiver with a radio that's running 36 or something else and vice versa. So if you want to use this then you've got to update your radio and you've got to update your entire receiver fleet. Back in the days of things like Crossfire that was really easy because it was all overtheair update stuff. So the first time you connected then that would automatically be detected and work that out.
So for me, there's only two things left in this project that I wish it had. One is to build in some backward compatibility potentially on the radio side so that it could listen and try and negotiate with a receiver to at least give us N minus one compatibility. So a version five setup of Express LRS will allow both version five and version four radios to connect to receivers. That would be amazing. And the other thing is to have some kind of overthe-air updates that worked seamlessly like the old Crossfire days. And that way when you updated your radio, it would just automatically update all the receivers. I guess that's tricky because everyone is making their own hardware. You'd have to have all of the targets stored in the radio, but I can wish, right?
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